I'm sitting in yet another coffee shop as I write this.  Once again it's my birthday and I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life and where I'm going.  I've just turned 42 which, as Douglas Adams would have it means I now have the answer to life, the universe, and everything.  Or I am the answer.  Or something like that.  I don't even know what I'm having for dinner tonight, let alone know what life is or is for so I'm probably not the best person to ask.

No, I'm not going to post a link …

entropic debugging - noun phrase - The phenomenon in which one can spend weeks on end debugging something using a multitude of techniques, give up in frustration and/or disgust for a couple of days, come back to the project and discover that somehow the bugs have magickally fixed themselves (as verified by diffs and file hashes if one cares to check).  The phenomenon is so named due to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy can never decrease, only increase in an isolated system.  In other words, as entropy increases overall in the universe it somehow wiped out the …

Depending on whom you talk to, the Voynich Manuscript is either one of the strangest books on the face of the planet, the key to the secrets of the universe, an elaborate puzzle by Dr. John Dee/Abdul al-Hazred/the Comte de Saint Germain/$other_mystical_figure, or a brilliant hoax. The text of the book is utterly incomprehensible - if it's a cypher, it's a damned good one. Many cryptographers and puzzle freaks over the years have tried and failed to decode it, though they've discovered a few interesting things. Current thought has it that the script was created from scratch by …